Happy New Year! My post a week or two ago (Friday 15 December 2018 - just scroll down) talked about clicking our computers to fight injustice. Today's post urges clicking too - to help rid ourselves of plastic rubbish. I was provoked into choosing plastic for today's topic, by Tuesday night's Prime News feature about plastic recyclables being exported to Asia, and, by an email letter I got from Greenpeace just a day before. Below the picture is the letter. Baled plastic, stockpiled, nowhere to go Hi John, Do you think that New Zealand should clean up its own plastic mess? Most of us do. Sign this petition and let’s get the NZ government to ban the export of plastic waste. You might have read recently about the broken global waste trade. Plastic rubbish - often recyclable - gets shipped from New Zealand to countries in Southeast Asia, lIke Malaysia. There it can be illegally dumped or burned - affecting the health of nearby communities. This destroys lives and the environment. But it also stops our government from taking the plastics crisis seriously. If they can just ship the problem overseas, there is much less reason for them to get to the root of the issue - and take action to stand up to the industries pushing single use plastic into our lives. Please sign the petition today and call on the government to ban the export of plastic waste. The government needs a cohesive strategy to tackle the plastics crisis. And together, we’re going to get one. Thanks to thousands of people already taking action, the government have agreed to ban plastic bags. Now, we need to go further. The story of what happens to New Zealand’s plastic when it leaves our shores has been in the newspapers for weeks. Malaysian activist Lay Peng Pua has been speaking to packed venues all across New Zealand. There is real movement growing thanks to Lay Leng’s story. If we can keep up the pressure, we can force governments to act. We can’t allow our oceans to be drowned in a sea of plastic to feed corporate profit. Please sign the petition, and let's get the government to ban the export of plastic waste. Let's keep going, Andrew and the whole crew at Greenpeace PS. Check out our video 'Where our plastic goes'. ClickedI've click-signed the petition and I hope many others will do so. Clicking one of the links in the Greenpeace letter not only takes you to signing the petition but opens other links giving more details of the Greenpeace case. Banning the export of 'finished-with' plastic means dealing with the problem ourselves and that points to severely reducing the quantity of plastic being made and used. Recycling is clearly useful but it is never going to solve the problem. Reduction is the only way. And that will have economic consequences such as loss of jobs. We need to face that. Pushing it?Greenpeace New Zealand I supported long before they moved into 'clickivism.' And I still do. But some of my friends and acquaintances think, and sometimes say: "Bunch of dangerous lunatic radicals. Jumping in front of whaling ships! Don't take notice of anything they say." True, they push the envelope. And I like that. Unless we have 'pushers', those of us in the middle ground don't take notice. EscapedThe last line of the Greenpeace letter moves from exporting recyleds to escaped plastic. 'We can’t allow our oceans to be drowned in a sea of plastic to feed corporate profit.' Recyling was meant to curb the quantity of plastic being thrown away. Perhaps it has, but look at the pictures below. Click them up big and the horror is revealed. Reduce the quantity of plastic and there will be less to throw into the sea! SlowI realise now that I was frighteningly slow to realise what plastic rubbish is doing to the sea and the sea's life. And, similarly, I was slow to realise that halting the easy availability of plastic bags from supermarkets could make a calculatable difference to the quantiy we throw away. I think that lots of us are slow to realise things. But now that supermarkets have said "No" we have all just accepted and complied. And that's good. However, why did we not voluntarily use fabric bags years ago? I sometimes talk about 'the rule of can'. If we can, we do. We can make lots of plastic bags, use them conviently, then throw them away. That we can, stops us from considering whether or not we should. Now that we have given up the supermarket plastic bags I hope we won't get complacent. There is a need to go further. That's what this post is about. ########## Note: Clicking the blue words below brings up a Google search, 'plastic waste statstics'. From there many interesting references can be reached. Plastic waste statistics John McInnes Friday 4 January 2019 Special note:
Friday afternoon posts on this blog will continue through the New Zealand Christmas summer holidays, except on 11 and 18 January. Then weekly posts will resume Friday 25 January.
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